Gender Myths and Feminist Fables:

Repositioning Gender in Development Policy and Practice

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex

2-4 July 2003

Sarah White, University of Bath

‘The 'Gender Lens': A Racial Blinder?’[1]

Introduction

This paper comes out of two abiding concerns in my engagement with international development: a concern with gender and a concern with race. I began work on gender in development (GAD)[i], while researching my PhD on women’s work and power in rural Bangladesh, 1984-88. Since then gender has occupied a central place in my consciousness, my academic life, and my practical work as (occasional) consultant for development agencies.

While this is my personal story, it also reflects my location in space and time. Born in 1960s Britain, my growing years coincided with those of the second wave feminist movement. While the heady politics of the 1970s came rather too soon for me, feminism hit academia in a major way at much the same time that I began reading seriously. In international development similarly, by the early 1980s feminist-inspired questioning was generating a whole range of innovative research and action. Since then ‘the gender issue’ in international development has gone from strength to strength. Far beyond the feminist lobby, there is now policy level agreement that gender is significant in achieving all the primary development objectives: reduced poverty; wider access to good health, education, land, technology and capital; environmental sustainability; institutional effectiveness; and democratic participation.

While gender has provided the dominant theme in my personal and professional life, there has also been a second motif, much more muted but nonetheless insistent and recurring, of race. By contrast with the high profile accorded to gender in development, there is an almost total silence on race in official publications.[ii] If at all it appears in coded ways, particularly under the rubric of ‘culture’. And yet racial awareness and racial struggle is also a major part of the history of the past forty years. The 1960s did not only see the rise of second wave feminism, but also of the civil rights movement in the United States, which in many ways pre-figured it. Martin Luther King became my childhood hero, while, beyond the peripheries of my vision, liberation struggles were waged or new independence won by many formerly colonised nations, offering a fundamental challenge to the dominant international and racial order.

While I had some involvement with race issues during my time as student in the UK, it was during my PhD research that this theme began to take its present form. As a white person in 1980s Bangladesh, I found myself in a position of marked racial privilege which, in typical middle class liberal fashion, made me profoundly uncomfortable, even as I benefited significantly from it. What I observed and experienced as I hovered around the margins of the aid community seemed to go far beyond individual acts of prejudice or discrimination to a whole system in which advantage and disadvantage were patterned by race.

Just as my earlier work reflected my location in time and space, so the present paper is part of a broader trend. As this workshop reflects, Gender and Development is not a unitary project, but a conflicted terrain over which a number of competing interests do battle. In development practice, high profile talk about gender is often accompanied by limited funding and on-going rumblings of resistance within donor agencies as well as recipient organisations. Activists with a background in feminist politics are perplexed by calls for 'gender training' as a purely technical intervention. Programme and project staff are frustrated with the limited results they achieve, and the gaps between the models they use and the way the women they are working with see their own lives. Amongst academics, the key terms of both 'gender' and 'development' are being hotly and creatively contested. The accepted distinction between sex and gender is questioned, as is the focus on women to the exclusion of men and masculinity and the abstraction of gender from other social relations such as race, class, age, sexuality and (dis)ability. Core assumptions of development are questioned by the dissolution of 'the West and the rest' dualisms through globalisation, and post-colonial writings which identify imperialism at the heart of modernity. The feminist and post-colonial writings come together with the more general discursive self-consciousness of post-modernism, which questions distinctions between 'self' and 'other', raises issues about the justice of moral and epistemological claims, and stresses the mutability of social identity.

While still at the margins, issues of race and identity are increasingly being raised with respect to development practice, particularly by feminists (see eg Matlanyane-Sexwale 1994; Crewe and Harrison 1998; Kothari 1997). ‘The whiteness of faces and Britishness of passports’ is now being found an ‘embarrassment’ in some UK development circles, when formerly it would have passed without notice (Moore 1998). The openly racist expatriate bar-talk of the past is no longer countenanced. Informal discussions reveal that many more of those working in development experience its racial divisions as a conscious and problematic contradiction. By far most critically, international politics since September 11 2001 has raised urgent questions concerning the links between 'development' and a particular Western geo-political and military project. The present paper is a small contribution to this wider context of questioning and review.

In focusing on GAD I do not, by any means, intend to question the basic legitimacy of the need for gender analysis. Indeed, in some ways GAD is a relatively soft target in that it includes some of the best of development - it has at least aimed to pose questions of power. At one level GAD may appear at the cultural vanguard of the development offensive, and certainly it has received far more opposition on the grounds of cultural imperialism than any other part of the development project. This fact can, however, be read another way, as signalling GAD's relative marginality and ambiguous status within the development project as a whole. In the real-politik of power and resistance it is rare that the centres of domination are the main objects of attack. Nevertheless, there is a danger that GAD implies that 'West is best' as it decries gender inequalities in Third World societies. There is a tendency to transfer uncritically Western analytical models to other contexts. There isa sense in which trying to bring about change in gender relations constitutes a cultural offensive. The challenge is to see these facts as points of entry into further questioning. How does an emancipatory project maintain or lose its radical agenda? To what extent do 'gender myths' challenge or reproduce the dominant 'development myths'? What is it in the formation of GAD and the development industry that determines this?

This paper takes the notion of a 'gender lens' as a way of exploring the myths of GAD. It begins by considering the 'gender lens' itself, and the new forms of awareness it engendered. It then goes on to explore the distortion of this 'lens' in its neglect of Black feminism - a critical lack, which not only indicates its partiality, but also vitally restricts its view. The paper closes by considering the way forward beyond the constitution of 'gender myths', to build on the achievements of GAD and its potential for development critique, to broaden and deepen both the understanding of power and the vision of emancipation.

A Note on Race

In considering the significance of race within GAD, I do not intend to essentialise race. I do not believe that racial difference exists in any absolute sense, rather it serves as one means by which inequities in the allocation of power, resources and cultural space are organised. In many ways, ‘race’ in this paper serves as a shorthand for the differences in power between ‘north’ and ‘south’, ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. With globalisation the mapping of race onto these distinctions - and perhaps the distinctions themselves - become increasingly problematic. As Winant (1994:19) notes: 'the geography of race is becoming more complex.' If 'expertise' constitutes the 'class-marker' for the development machine, the key signifier of difference lies in the contrast between 'international' and 'local'. This can serve as a proxy for race, but does not always do so. As with gender, the meanings that race bears differ radically by context. Believing as I do that gender analysis has been hampered by its association with a dichotomous schema of sexual difference, the last thing I wish is to replace this with a dualistic understanding of race. Rather, I believe that exploring the silences on race in development may serve as a key to unlocking the power relations inscribed within it, that operate through race but are no means contained by it. My ultimate aim is to argue the need for a more inclusive approach to social justice in development, which comprehends and transcends all the various ways in which differences are established and inequities secured.

The 'Gender Lens'

The most celebrated achievement of WID/GAD is to bring ‘women’ in to development. This took place at two distinct levels. First, and receiving most attention, this meant that poor women in the south who had been by-passed by development were now newly included amongst its ‘beneficiaries’. Second, it also involved the expansion of middle class women as the agents of development, engaged in development planning and outreach. In both cases this new incorporation of ‘women’ involved two linked processes. First, ‘bringing women in’ signalled a quantitative increase in the numbers of women engaged in development. But just as significantly, it also entailed a new awareness of women, through the constitution of ‘women’ as a distinct group, a group which was marked by its gender. As several GAD critics pointed out, women had always participated in development, they had just not been recognised as such. The new gender awareness thus did not create women’s involvement in development, but rather re-figured it, first by labelling women as a group and second by incorporating them more directly within the apparatus of intervention. Thus while women were already involved in farming or small business, they were now more likely to be targeted directly by agricultural extension workers or credit providers. Within the agencies similarly, the adoption of WID/GAD was due to the agitation of a broader women’s movement, combined with pressure exerted by (mainly) women already employed within them. In many cases, it was these existing employees who then became the ‘new’ women’s officers (see eg Williams, 1999). Where they had formerly been simply employees, they were now marked as women, by virtue of occupying ‘gender posts.’ As the WID/GAD tide rose, of course, this provided a further impulse for agencies to increase the number of women employees, many of whom had GAD-related responsibilities. A reverse process of labelling then became evident. WID/GAD came to be labelled ‘women’s work’ with all the negative associations for status that this carried. In some cases this was compounded by the employment of wives of staff members to those posts, which was seen further to compromise their professional status (Jahan 1995,41). More generally, appointments were made at a junior level, and outside the regular departmental structures, giving them the status of outsiders within.

The new marking of ‘women’ as a distinct group required the creation of new thinking, which came to be labelled ‘gender awareness’ and new programmes of ‘gender training’ to instil this.[iii] These programmes offer an important site for the play of 'gender myths'. Usually undertaken in a participatory style, gender training involves both the ‘unlearning’ of folk knowledge about women, and the absorption of new understandings. This may be tackled at a number of levels, social, individual and institutional. Techniques borrowed from consciousness raising unearth the ‘wisdoms’ or myths of popular culture, in proverbs and common sayings or imagery about men and women, boys and girls. They also challenge individuals' gendered assumptions about ‘proper’ behaviour or stereotyping of 'masculine' or 'feminine' characteristics.

The major part of most gender training, however, concentrates on application to development programmes, utilising a range of frameworks for analysing sexual divisions of labour and power. The primary concern is to move women out of the ‘women and children’ (social welfare) category and into the development category of ‘productive workers.’ Against the ‘myths’ such as ‘farmers are men’ or ‘women don’t work’ are substituted the ‘facts’ of women’s global overwork (2/3 of all) and under-reward (10% of income, 1% of property). As this workshop demonstrates, ironically these so-called facts have themselves acquired a mythic quality. They have been endlessly repeated, mantra-like, in diverse contexts, despite their questionable empirical basis (Baden and Goetz 1998:23). They have also conjured up larger than life figures, (female) victims and heroes doing battle with (male) villains, with development agencies playing the part of fairy godmother (or father?), whose wisdom and esoteric powers promise a magical transformation of fortunes.

The description now popular within some GAD circles of gender analysis as a ‘gender lens’, expresses clearly what this process of inculcating ‘gender awareness’ involves. It offers, as it were, a new set of spectacles, a way of seeing the world, in which gender (for which read sexual difference) is magnified and constituted as the primary power relation. There is a clear dilemma here. Just as 'gender-blind' frameworks distort the analysis of a given context, so the use of a 'gender lens' may inappropriately 'read in' gender difference, and/or block the exploration of other power relations. Within the overwhelmingly economistic and politics-shy context of development agencies, it was relatively easy for gender to become the justice issue; women the 'minority' whose interests should be considered; so that social development, in many agencies, was largely commandeered by gender specialists. At its worst, the common GAD phrase, 'using a gender lens' could therefore take on a malign meaning: that gender dimensions of difference were magnified, while all others were screened out.

GAD and the Neglect of Black Feminism

On beginning to explore the issue of race in GAD literature, the silence becomes deafening. Both a marker and a determinant of this is the absence of Black feminism within GAD frameworks. My own work is as guilty of this as any one else's. It was not until I began working specifically on issues of race, that I came to see this. Having written an outline of the problems in GAD before looking in detail at Black feminist writers, I was doubly shocked: first at the extent to which my own reference points were white; and second at how accurately the Black feminist critique identifies the present problems with gender and development.

Since this is so much the norm, so much the way that things have been done that it goes without saying, it is worth just reflecting a little on how strange this is. First, the major challenge to 1970s feminism was mounted by Black and working class women on just this point: that its white middle class leadership had whitewashed class and race dynamics in assuming as universal their own priorities and view of feminist struggle. The power of this critique means that no feminist activist or academic would now deny that gender and other forms of social difference are fundamentally related. Second, a major part of development involves international and inter-racial encounter. You would think that development, with this context and its remit for social change would be at the forefront of theorising and practising anti-racism. Third, GAD - or a part of it - is the key place in development which explicitly addresses power relations. How can it, then, have been so blind to the exercise of power by race?

Black feminism is clearly diverse, with many points of internal contestation and difference. However, the basic approach rests on a number of points in common. While these are well known, their silencing in the context of development means that it is worth briefly stating them here. Critically, Black feminists assert that gender relations are fundamentally linked with those of race and class, and that to abstract gender from this context is both analytically flawed and socially exclusive. This foregrounds the diversity amongst women and the contradictory relations in and between them.

Following on from this, Black feminists have differed from white in four main areas. First, Black feminists have consistently resisted a simple identification of 'men as the enemy' and instead assert that their struggle must involve alliances with men. Second, they question the identification of paid work with women's empowerment, and emphasise instead how employment may be a key site of contradiction for women, and for the reproduction of difference by class, gender and race. Third, Black feminists have rejected the emphasis on the family as a primary location of oppression. Instead they have analysed the family as a site of resistance and/or seen the oppression within it as the expression of relations which have their source elsewhere. Finally, Black women have infused the feminist slogan 'the personal is political' with a particular power. More strongly than their white colleagues they have maintained the primacy of the personal as the place from which theory is made sense, resisting the academic tendency to slip back into distance and abstraction.